A New Era of Affordable Housing Policy?

This morning, Mayor de Blasio released a housing plan that is an exciting, ambitious vision and a substantial down payment towards a new era in housing policy.  Housing New York is a plan to build and preserve 200,000 units over the next ten years, making it the largest affordable housing effort of any New York City mayor. And as every resident of our city knows, the scale of the affordable housing need is huge, so the plan is correctly ambitious.

But as important as the scale of the plan is, the more important promise is the emphasis on affordable housing that will best meet the needs of local communities and build stronger neighborhoods. Clearly, this means working closely with the greatest asset the New York City housing community has: our local not-for-profit developers, who have decades of experience building vibrant, diverse neighborhoods under severe financial restraints. But this also means building housing that is truly affordable to local residents, building housing that will be affordable for generations to come, not just 30 years, and preserving affordable housing and diverse, mixed-income communities in places where rents are skyrocketing and long-term residents are being rapidly pushed out.

Another important promise – and a truly groundbreaking one – is the City’s commitment to re-balance the interests of private developers with the needs of the community. The city has many tools at its disposal to incentivize the creation of affordable housing – including zoning incentives, tax abatements, free land, low-interest financing, direct subsidy – but for too long the city has created a guaranteed windfall for private developers without enough benefit in the form of good affordable housing for the local community.

The key elements of the plan are:

• Adding zoning density to incentivize new private development, but work to ensure that development meets the infrastructure and affordability needs of the community.  This includes using Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning so affordable housing is directly required in newly zoned mid- and high-density developments. The City will begin the in-depth planning process to get the details of this program right.

• Committing to deeper affordability so the housing that is built better meets the real income needs of our neighborhoods.  The plan promises to serve four times as many extremely low-income New Yorkers as have been served in the previous 12 years. In addition to a greater emphasis on the extremely low-income, the City is also looking to build more moderate-and middle-income housing as well, and generally serve a broader income mix. And, importantly, the city has acknowledged that because of the way Federal Income Limits are designed, the official “low-, moderate- and middle-income” bands are actually much higher than real New York City incomes.

• Proposes to protect the value of the taxpayer investment in the housing by committing to long-term affordability for inclusionary and other affordable units. This will include a new state-backed long-term affordability regulatory tool.

• Promising to strengthen neighborhoods by developing comprehensively, with affordable housing not just standing alone, but as an anchor for vibrant, mixed-use communities.

• Protecting private tenants facing displacement by adding new city programs that focus on both protecting physically distressed housing, and protecting tenants in affordable housing that are being pushed out.  This includes using the City’s leverage to get owners and lenders of distressed building portfolios to sell to preservation-minded buyers.

These points are very much in line with what ANHD and many others in the affordable housing community have been calling for, and we greatly commend the administration for listening to stakeholders in our neighborhoods, and reacting with a comprehensive, progressive housing plan that not only builds, but builds smart, and builds a more equitable city.

As the details of the plan start to come into focus, ANHD will be looking for:
 

1)      A Central Role for Nonprofit Community Development Corporations.

New York City has the most talented and dedicated affordable housing community in the country. Ever since the City partnered with local non-profit organizations to rebuild our communities devastated by the disinvestment of the 1970s and 80s, we have found ways to creatively build and finance affordable housing. A strong and quantifiable role in the new housing plan for local not-for-profit developers, with experience working in the community, is a must for any housing plan that seeks to go beyond just building brick-and-mortar to truly build the neighborhoods New York City needs to thrive.

If the City wants to build neighborhoods, it must partner with these neighborhoods, and this partnership must be throughout the planning and development process, and in all types of developments – from neighborhood visioning and planning, to tenant organizing and support, to on-the-ground, bricks-and-mortar development and construction; and from preserving and rehabilitating distressed properties, to doing small infill development, to doing the large-scale, new construction that needs a comprehensive neighborhood context.  Click here for more information. 

2)      Real Affordability of affordable housing units in neighborhoods.

The City is commendably focusing on spreading affordability and providing housing for New Yorkers who were left out of the last plan – most notably the more than 1/3 of New Yorkers who make less than 50% of AMI – and also on targeting neighborhoods where price pressures are rising for additional preservation tools in order to retain a mixed-income community. However, the city is still restrained by Federal policy that vastly overinflates what “low-income” actually is. ANHD will continue to advocate with the city for a change in these policies, and will continue to advocate for housing that is built according to the actual lived conditions and needs of people in the neighborhood where it is built.  Click here for ANHD’s Real Affordability report. 

3)       Permanently Affordable housing that ensures our public investment remains over the long term. 

We’ve seen what happens to developments where the affordable housing has come with an expiration date, and it’s a lose-lose: either stable, working- and middle-class communities become the scenes of rent pressure and harassment, or the city overpays to keep a few more years of affordability. We cannot afford to repeat this mistake. Mixed-income neighborhoods need to stay mixed-income, through the new affordable housing being affordable permanently. The City’s plan promises a large step in this direction, and ANHD will soon come out with a report detailing the financial feasibility of long-term and permanently affordable housing.  Click here for more information. 

4)      A Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning policy for all our neighborhoods.

The City has taken an enormous step forward – putting out a policy that, for the first time, guarantees affordable housing created as a result of city upzonings. This is an incredible start – but it’s not the finish. Most of the opportunity for building tall and dense has already been given away: with no guarantees of affordable housing or, at best, only a weak voluntary IZ program in place. We need an across-the-board solution for all our neighborhoods, not just some. This will take time to develop – but in the meantime we need to make sure every new development that is a result of city action comes with affordable housing. Making it easier to build as-of-right in some instances, as the city is proposing, may be necessary, but only if the correct amount of affordable housing is included.   Click here for more information. 

Housing New York is a good blueprint. But there is much left to do, and much left to build. We look forward to working with the city in this exciting new time.